THE command from Eddie Koiki Mabo's daughter, Gail, served only to heighten the emotional charge of what was always going to be a remarkable reunion in Townsville yesterday.

"You march up the front with us, because you're part of the family," she told Greg McIntyre, who acted as Mabo's solicitor in the case that ended the fiction that Australia belonged to no one when the white man arrived. So Mr McIntyre, 60, marched for reconciliation with Mabo's wife, Bonita, 72, five of their nine children, 18 of their grandchildren and one great-grandchild as they celebrated the 20th anniversary of the landmark decision.

Mr McIntyre admitted he "choked up" at the first sight of Mrs Mabo, her frail frame driving home the length of the struggle and the strength of the bond he shared her husband, who succumbed to cancer less than six months before the decision. He was 56.

"We just greeted each other like long lost friends," he said.

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The Mabo family did not know Mr McIntyre, now a senior counsel in Perth, had made the trip until he rose to speak early on a day of dancing, singing and celebrating in the city where the decision to mount a test case on land rights was taken in 1981.

"It was just awesome that he was here," said Celuia Mabo, 39, youngest of the Mabos' children. "It was so good to see him after all that time," agreed her mother.

Declaring how privileged he felt to honour a great man, Mr McIntyre produced the hat he was given in 1988 by the Merian women on Mabo's Murray Island when the High Court visited to take evidence.

He recalled how all the lawyers had been given hats for a photograph during a break in proceedings, and how the women asked the barrister representing the Queensland government, which opposed their claim, to give his back after the picture was taken.

"He was a bit taken aback, but I've still got my hat," Mr McIntyre said, describing it as a metaphor for the struggle. "When it was first given to me, it was a vivid green colour and new and young. Now it's faded and it's lost all of its colour. But it still has its strength."

Mr McIntyre was asked by Mabo to assemble a legal team and begin a test case after he was invited to a land rights conference at James Cook University in 1981. He then recruited barristers, the late Ron Castan and Dr Bryan Keon-Cohen, SC.

"It's the most significant thing that I've done as a lawyer and as a person with an interest in social justice," he says of the case.

Mabo's legacy will be discussed at a three-day conference starting in Townsville today, where the consensus will be that the decision has failed to deliver either the bright future it promised indigenous people, or the catastrophes predicted by those who said backyards were at risk.

But historian Henry Reynolds, who fuelled Mabo's confidence that he would succeed, says there can be no doubting the importance of what Mabo and his co-plaintiffs, Dave Passi and James Rice achieved.

"Mabo, Passi and Rice took on the mammoth tasks of changing a law which had been central to the Australian legal system for 200 years," Professor Reynolds said in a lecture to mark the occasion.

"Their struggle was not just for justice for the Merian people, but for all tribal and traditional people around the world.''